ZURICH. Mario Irminger says the job cuts that follow the merger of Migros’s ten regional cooperatives will “certainly not” run into the thousands. The chief executive, who told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung he will leave in mid-2027, also refused to put a number on the redundancies at all. “I do not wish to set such a figure today,” he said, and he called figures already in circulation wrong.
Those figures are why the interview matters. The SonntagsZeitung has reported potential savings of CHF 300 million to CHF 400 million a year, a sum that could mean about 3,000 posts. The NZZ has put a narrower range on the administration, of 400 to 600 jobs. Irminger, 61, would not adopt either. What he did say is that duplication in management and in the administrations will go. That is a smaller claim than a chain-wide clear-out, and it is the one he is prepared to stand behind before the members vote.
A resignation timed for the handover
Irminger was brought in as chief executive in 2023. He now says he is “deeply convinced it is better to stop too early than too late,” and that he chose the date so a new leadership can take over. The timing is not a quiet exit. Before he leaves the high-rise on Limmatplatz he still has to win the membership ballot on the largest reorganisation in the history of Migros.
The ten cooperatives would fold into one. Every regional board has already said yes. The people who own the business have not. About 2.3 million members have a say, and the hurdle Irminger described is steep: roughly 380,000 yes votes are needed to carry the ballot. Each cooperative must also clear its own majority. A national efficiency case can still fail in one region.
What the merger is supposed to buy
The case he is making is efficiency, not shrinkage for its own sake. Ten head offices doing parts of the same work is the duplication he wants gone. A single cooperative, on his account, can buy, plan and run the supermarkets as one company instead of ten. Staff in the stores are not the group he is talking about when he talks about overlapping administrations. He has not, though, published a list of which desks close, which is why the outside estimates filled the gap.
Households will notice the argument before they notice an organogram. Migros is the country’s largest retailer. A merger that saves hundreds of millions is also a merger that changes who decides prices, ranges and local shops. The members’ vote is the check on that. Irminger’s line this week is that the savings are real, the scare number of thousands of jobs is not, and he will stay long enough to ask the owners. He will not stay long enough to run whatever they decide.